Climbing is fun, so is making climbing holds. Its also a good way to make good use of scrap wood.
Here’s one with a finger pocket.
drilling holes
the drill bit does most of the carving
clean up the triangles with a chisel
edges of the pocket are rounded with a chisel and a hole is drilled for a 3/8″ washer
an interesting shape already
Because of its shape, there’s no material for the forstner bit to center on, so I cut a sacrificial piece to help the bit center until it cut deep enough.
with sacrificial block
starting to drill
We tried some unique textures, but we decided it looked kind of gross.
yay for dremels and dremel burrs
A belt sander quickly removes the unwanted texture. The canvas is blank again.
belt sander to the rescue!
the fruits of our afternoon labors
On a different day, I also made a hangboard. Forgot to take any in-progress photos – sorry, but below is the final product. The pockets were made by drilling a line of holes with a forstner bit and then cutting away the rest with a chisel. I then used a 1/4″ radius router bit to round all the edges. I don’t have a router yet, so I (ab)used my drill press as a router. This mostly worked because pine is so soft.
The sloped holds on the top are 2×4′s cut on a compound miter saw and covered in some grip tape material, which is like sandpaper with adhesive on the back – like what is on skateboards. All the pieces are glued and screwed to a piece of 3/4″ plywood.
To mount it to my wall, I bolted some 2×4 rails into the studs of the house, and then screwed the hangboard to those rails.
completed hangboard
